The use of thebe-passive in academic Englishes: localversusglobal usage in an international language

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the diffusion of a syntactic change in a specialised text type in different World Englishes – in particular, the use of be-passives in academic discourse in nine contact varieties of English and six English as a Native Language (ENL) varieties. The Zürich-parsed International Corpus of English (ICE) makes it possible to retrieve automatically, for the first time, the two variants in the envelope of variation: active transitive constructions and be-passives. We apply regression analysis in order to gauge the effect of potential external factors that play a role in the choice between them: regional variety (with potential influence from the substrate in the contact varieties) and academic sub-discipline. The use of the passive has undergone change in the twentieth century (see, for example, Leech et al., 2009 ). As a necessary backdrop for variation found in the ICE corpora, we therefore use historical data from the extended Brown family of corpora, which have also been parsed at the University of Zürich. The results of our analysis show that regional variety is less important than academic sub-discipline: with the sole exception of American English, be-passives are about equally frequent in both ENL and contact varieties; moreover, they are distributed similarly across all varieties according to academic sub-discipline (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology).

Voice Alternation and Authorial Presence: Variation across Disciplinary Areas in Academic English

“…Previous research has shown that US scientific writing takes the lead in an ongoing change: the decline in the use of passives relative to active transitive clauses (Seoane & Loureiro-Porto 2005; Seoane 2006a, 2006b; Leech et al 2009). Hundt, Schneider, and Seoane (2016) show that regional variety is one of the factors determining the frequency of passives in academic writing, with a divide between American English (AmE), on the one hand, and fourteen (inner and outer circle) varieties of English, on the other. Statistically more significant, however, is the pronounced variation across disciplinary areas, with the soft sciences showing lower proportions of passives than the hard sciences.…”

“…On the basis of automatically retrieved central be -passives and active transitives in several components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), 2 Hundt, Schneider, and Seoane (2016) analyze voice alternation in the academic discourse of six native varieties of English (ENL) and nine contact varieties of English (eight ESL, English as a second language, and one ESD, English as a second dialect). Regression analysis reveals a regional divide between AmE, with the lowest rate of passives, and all other varieties, which tend to be closer to BrE, regardless of whether they are native or contact varieties.…”

Predicting voice alternation across academic Englishes

“…On the whole, the structurally markedly different passive constructions that are due to general processes of second-language acquisition are quite likely to have been edited out in published academic writing. Hundt et al (2016) test for recall of automatically retrieved transitive active and passive constructions and are able to show that such characteristically ESL constructions are very infrequent in the academic part of the ICE corpora.…”

“…Leech et al 2009) identified regional differences in a shift from passive towards active constructions, which is more pronounced in American English (AmE) than in British English (BrE) academic writing. The question was whether the trend towards greater use of the active voice could also be found in other first-and second-language varieties of English (see Hundt et al 2016). In this paper, we add to previous research by looking into the factors predicting the choice between active and passive.…”

“…The annotation process includes partof-speech tagging, chunking and parsing and makes automatic retrieval of passives and active transitives possible (see next Section). 3.2 Data retrieval Hundt et al (2016) comment in detail on the automatic retrieval of central bepassives and active transitives. We make use of the same approach to retrieve data from the seven ICE components.…”